Movie Review | 'Shanghai Ghetto'

Jews Find an Open Port in China

By DAVE KEHR

Published: September 27, 2002

In the late 1930's Jews seeking to escape Nazi Germany found most of the world's ports closed to them. At the Evian Conference of 1938, called to address the refugee situation, the United States joined Britain, Australia, Canada and 27 other European and South American countries in refusing to alter its immigration policies to permit more Jews to enter.

The doors of the democracies seemed firmly shut and locked. But a curious loophole had opened in Shanghai, a city already colonized by Western interests and long home to a large number of Jews of Russian and British citizenship. With the city divided into various international zones and the Japanese Imperial Army poised to invade, passport control had become nonexistent. European Jews with sufficient resources could charter passage on Japanese liners through the Suez Canal. At least 20,000 refugees reached Shanghai in this manner, forming a settlement in the middle of the city's most impoverished neighborhood.

The story of the Shanghai Jews is related in "Shanghai Ghetto," a documentary directed by Dana Janklowicz-Mann and Amir Mann that opens today in Manhattan. The film uses standard techniques to tell its tale — videotaped interviews with survivors interspersed with newsreel images from the period — but does so with integrity and attention to detail.

One of the film's most compelling witnesses is Harold Janklowicz, the father of one of the filmmakers. Mr. Janklowicz, a soft-spoken, kind-faced man, recalls arriving in Shanghai at the age of 8 with his mother and finding a strange new world, a world of poverty, squalor and an essential glimmer of hope. His mother found work by making ladies' hats at home, and he was able to attend schools operated by the local Jewish community.

Mr. Janklowicz's most painful memory remains the almost daily beatings he received from a Russian bully at the school — beatings he returned when, at the end of the war, he went back with two friends to find his former tormentor and nearly beat him to death. For Mr. Janklowicz it was as if all the anger he had repressed for years had come to the surface. "If my friends hadn't been there, I probably would have killed him," he says, still astonished at the depth of his own rage.

As the filmmakers are careful to point out, the refugees, as impoverished as they were, were still considerably better off than the desperately poor Chinese population that surrounded them. And at the end of the war, when word arrived of the immense atrocities that had been committed in Europe, any traces of self-pity vanished. The Shanghai Jews had, in their way, been blessed.